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eof writes:

The Washington Post has an article asking the question "Which languages will dominate the future?" The answer depends on your interests: making money in growth markets; speaking with as many people as possible; speaking only one language while traveling; or learning about culture. As you might imagine, the article concludes

There is no one single language of the future. Instead, language learners will increasingly have to ask themselves about their goals and own motivations before making a decision.

[...] In a recent U.K.-focused report, the British Council, a think tank, identified more than 20 growth markets and their main languages. The report features languages spoken in the so-called BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — that are usually perceived as the world's biggest emerging economies, as well as more niche growth markets that are included in lists produced by investment bank Goldman Sachs and services firm Ernst & Young.

"Spanish and Arabic score particularly highly on this indicator," the British Council report concluded for the U.K. However, when taking into account demographic trends until 2050 as laid out by the United Nations, the result is very different.

Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Indonesian will dominate much of the business world by 2050, followed by Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian. If you want to get the most money out of your language course, studying one of the languages listed above is probably a safe bet.

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"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports

The government is hiring an IT cloud director at a cool £1,000 per day, for a bod proficient in Microsoft cloud systems--and just about every other form of enterprise IT.

[...] £1,000 per day [is] significantly more than Prime Minister David Cameron's £142,000 annual salary.

The IT director will oversee the development, design, and implementation of new applications and changes to existing computer systems and software packages, [the advert] said.

Candidates must have proven knowledge and experience of operating within a Microsoft private cloud system system, it said. However, they should also have proven knowledge in non-Microsoft technologies, such as Agresso, Cisco core networking, NetApp Storage, and HP Blade Centre and Compute.

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Phoenix666 writes:

A Florida State University and University of Alaska Fairbanks research team has uncovered a new species of duck-billed dinosaur, a 30-footlong herbivore that endured months of winter darkness and probably experienced snow.

The skeletal remains of the dinosaurs were found in a remote part of Alaska. These dinosaurs were the northernmost dinosaurs known to have ever lived.

"The finding of dinosaurs this far north challenges everything we thought about a dinosaur's physiology," said FSU Professor of Biological Science Greg Erickson. "It creates this natural question. How did they survive up here?"

The dinosaur is named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis, which means ancient grazer of the Colville River. The remains were found along the Colville River in a geological formation in northern Alaska known as the Prince Creek Formation.

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takyon writes:

The BBC reports on a UC Irvine brain-computer interface (BCI) that has allowed a man with a spinal cord injury to walk:

A paralysed man has regained some control over his legs using a device that reads his brain, scientists say. Brainwaves were interpreted by a computer, which then controlled the electrical stimulation of his leg muscles.

The US study, in the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation, showed he was able to walk just under four metres with support. Experts said maintaining balance was an issue that needed to be addressed. A spinal cord injury prevents the flow of messages from the brain. However, the brain is still able to create messages and the legs are still capable of receiving them.

The researchers at the University of California, Irvine, used a brain-computer interface to bypass the damage in a man who had been paralysed for five years. An electroencephalogram (EEG) cap read the activity of the man's brain and his initial training was to control a virtual person or avatar in a computer game.

Videos of a patient walking using a BCI and training with a virtual avatar are available on this channel.

Brain-Computer Interface Control of Walking After Spinal Cord Injury project page

Full paper: The feasibility of a brain-computer interface functional electrical stimulation system for the restoration of overground walking after paraplegia

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Phoenix666 writes:

Researchers from multiple institutions have come together to publish Earth's most complete family tree to date, illustrating the evolutionary relationships between about 2.3 million named species of lifeforms over the course of roughly 3.5 billion years on the planet.
...
While exhaustive, scientists still have a long way to go. That's because it's believed there are currently about 8.7 million species on the planet today and countless others from Earth's past that are yet to be catalogued.

In an effort to expand the tree even further over time, the researchers, who collaborated from 11 institutions, have put their work online at Open Tree of Life -- a massive and open-access digital depository where anyone can download, view and edit the tree -- a kind of "Wikipedia" for evolutionary trees.

It's an impressive feat to accomplish in 25 years, considering it took 90 years to complete the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, another large cataloguing project. The graphic is worth looking at, too.

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mendax writes:

El Reg published an article today that goes into detail about why AWS (Amazon Web Services) went "tits up" (as El Reg likes to put it) on Sunday (reported here on Monday):

Today, it's emerged the mega-outage was caused by vital systems in one part of AWS taking too long to send information to another part that was needed by customers.

Picture a steakhouse in which the cooks are taking so long to prepare the food, the side dishes have gone cold by the time the waiters and waitresses take the plates from the chef to the hungry diners. The orders have to be started again from scratch, the whole operation is overwhelmed, the chef walks out, and ultimately customers aren't getting fed. A typical Gordon Ramsay kitchen nightmare.

In technical terms, the internal metadata servers in AWS's DynamoDB database service were not answering queries from the storage systems within a particular time limit.

It gets worse, however, as it seemed to be happening again:

As your humble hack hammers away at the keyboard, the Amazon DynamoDB service in the US-East-1 region is suffering from "increased error rates", which started at 0633 PT today. Hours into the disruption, the team is battling to improve the situation.

At 1204 PT, the AWS gang admitted: "One of our mitigations has increased error rates and latencies for some tables. We are actively working to resolve these."

El Reg was kind enough to provide a link to a page from Amazon's engineers describing in great detail the cause of the problem.

Current status is available on the AWS Service Health Dashboard.

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Phoenix666 writes:

When the Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car is unveiled this week, the public will be able to see the many innovative technologies used in its construction. Several surface panels will be removed so that people can look inside to get a sense of the engineering required to make a car move faster than 1,000mph.

Given the bespoke nature of Bloodhound, a significant number of its components have been fabricated using 3D printing techniques. This includes even the steering wheel.

With over 3,500 custom-made parts, it would have been prohibitively expensive, and wasteful, for the Bloodhound project to use traditional batch production approaches in many instances. The complex design of the car also demands shapes that are difficult - sometimes impossible - to make using traditional tooling. As a consequence, the car's designers were always going to make good use of "additive manufacturing".

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dublet writes:

If ratified by the court, this would be a problem for companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, etc., requiring them to have separate EU and US data centers.

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hemocyanin writes:

FBI Said to Recover Personal E-Mails From Hillary Clinton Server

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation. ... A review by Clinton and her aides determined that about half of the 60,000 e-mails she exchanged during her four-year tenure as secretary of state were of a personal nature, the presidential candidate has said. ...

In 2013, the Clintons turned the private server over to a Colorado-based technology company to manage. The firm, Platte River Networks, installed the device in a New Jersey data center and managed and maintained it.

Andy Boian, a spokesman for the Platte River, said the FBI last month asked the company to hand over the server. Platte River asked the Clintons what it should do, and within 24 hours a representative for the Clintons told the company to provide the device to agents, Boian said.

There has been some question as to whether Clinton deleted her messages or took the more thorough and technical step of "wiping" the server. Boian said Tuesday that Platte River had "no knowledge of it being wiped."

Wow. What are the odds she just deleted the emails rather than doing a real wipe? It's obvious that she wanted personal total control over her emails -- that is the whole point of personal server -- and if she failed to get competent advice on how to actually wipe a machine, it demonstrates her own lack of competence in selecting people who are actual experts to help her do the things she wants. Doing a multi-pass overwrite with random data isn't exactly esoteric knowledge -- that's pretty basic stuff. There is of course the brute force method as well. Surely she remembers the Air Force personnel smashing computer equipment when they had to land in China after a midair collision. Or the destruction of The Guardian's Snowden hard drives.

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fliptop writes:

Exploit acquisition firm Zerodium is offering a $1 million bounty for an exclusive, browser-based, and untethered jailbreak:

...the exploit/jailbreak must include a chain of iOS 9 exploits which bypass all mitigation systems including ASLR, sandboxes, code signing, and bootchains, and must lead to and allow "a remote, privileged, and persistent installation of an arbitrary app" on a fully updated iOS 9 device.

Zerodium wants the initial attack vector -- the place where exploits can be served -- to be a web page targeting the mobile versions of the Safari or Google Chrome browser, a web page targeting an application reachable through the browser or either an SMS/MMS message.

"The whole exploitation/jailbreak process should be achievable remotely, reliably, silently, and without requiring any user interaction except visiting a web page or reading a SMS/MMS (attack vectors such as physical access, Bluetooth, NFC, or baseband are not eligible for the Million Dollar iOS 9 Bug Bounty. Zerodium may, at its sole discretion, make a distinct offer to acquire such attack vectors)," Zerodium states.

The competition is open until 31 October.

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HughPickens.com writes:

The Independent reports that so far this year more people have died while trying to taking a 'selfie' than from shark attacks. So far, 12 people have lost their life while trying to take a photo of themselves but the number of people who have died as a result of a shark attack was only eight. Some recent selfie-fatalities: A 66-year-old tourist from Japan recently died after falling down some stairs while trying to take a photo at the Taj Mahal in India, a Mississippi woman was gored to death by a bison while visiting Yellowstone National Park, and in August a man trying to take a selfie was gored to death during a running of the bulls in Villaseca de la Sagra, Spain.

Some groups have been trying to get on top of the wave. In June Disney banned selfie sticks in its amusement parks. And foreseeing the selfie crisis in a very specific way, New York State passed a bill in June 2014 to prohibit people from having their photo taken (or taking it themselves) while "hugging, patting or otherwise touching tigers." In July the Russian Interior Ministry released a brochure, warning about cool selfies that "could cost you your life" and urging selfie-takers to take precaution with weapons, ledges, dangerous animals, trains and live wires. "Before taking a selfie, everyone should think about the fact that racing after a high number of 'likes' could lead him on a journey to death and his last extreme photo could turn out to be posthumous," said an aide to Russia's interior minister.

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Phoenix666 writes:

Broadband Internet access is a "core utility" that people need in order to participate in modern society– just like electricity, running water, and sewers, the White House said on Tuesday. A report written by the Broadband Opportunity Council, a group created earlier this year by President Obama and co-chaired by the Secretaries of Commerce and Agriculture, says that even though broadband "has steadily shifted from an optional amenity to a core utility," millions of Americans still lack high-speed Internet access.

The report cites 2013 data indicating that about 51 million Americans, or about 16 percent of the population, cannot purchase broadband access at their homes. That number may have dropped by now, but the White House says the government needs to make a bigger push to expand broadband deployment, especially in rural areas and low-income communities.

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Phoenix666 writes:

In another poll indicating the sign of the times, Gallup reports:

Almost half of Americans, 49%, say the federal government poses "an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens," similar to what was found in previous surveys conducted over the last five years. When this question was first asked in 2003, less than a third of Americans held this attitude.

[...] The latest results are from Gallup's Sept. 9-13 Governance poll. The lower percentage of Americans agreeing in 2003 that the federal government posed an immediate threat likely reflected the more positive attitudes about government evident after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The percentage gradually increased to 44% by 2006, and then reached the 46% to 49% range in four surveys conducted since 2010.

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number6 writes:

...Which Makes Privacy Cases Even Harder.

Source: Article by Staci Zaretsky at 'Above The Law' 21-SEP-2015

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Phoenix666 writes:

In deserts and other arid lands, microbes often form very thin top layers on soil known as biocrusts, which behave a bit like Rip Van Winkle. He removed himself from a stressful environment by sleeping for decades, and awoke to a changed world; similarly, the biocrust's microbes lie dormant for long periods until precipitation (such as a sudden downpour) awakens them. Understanding more about the interactions between the microbial communities—also called "microbiomes"—in the biocrusts and their adaptations to their harsh environments could provide important clues to help shed light on the roles of soil microbes in the global carbon cycle.

"In support of DOE's mission to untangle the complexities of the carbon cycle, we're using the biocrust system to examine the specific metabolites in soil and how microbes target these compounds," said Trent Northen, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. "Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and soil microbes are typically studied as broad groups, and we wanted to examine the specific relationship between the diversity of soils metabolites and the diversity of microbes."

In a study published September 22, 2015 in Nature Communications, a team led by Northen used seven bacterial isolates from desert biocrusts, one of them the cyanobacterium Microcoleus vaginatus -sequenced by the DOE JGI—that had been the focus of earlier work. The isolates were cultivated in what Northen describes as "a virtual smorgasbord" of metabolites containing almost 500 compounds until they stopped growing. Northen and his collaborators deployed a set of tools that he calls "exometabolomics" which harnesses the analytical capabilities of the latest mass spectrometry techniques to quantitatively measure how each microbes and the biocrust community transforms complex mixtures of metabolites, in this case, from soil.

The research seems particularly apropos to the search for life on Mars, and, barring discovery of Martian life, the potential for terraforming there.

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takyon writes:

From Michigan State University via Futurity:

Researchers at Michigan State University have built a molecular Swiss Army knife that streamlines the molecular machinery of cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, making biofuels and other green chemical production from these organisms more viable.

The team has done in a year what has taken millions of years to evolve. In the current issue of Plant Cell, they describe how they fabricated a synthetic protein that not only improves the assembly of the carbon-fixing factory of cyanobacteria, but also provides a proof of concept for a device that could potentially improve plant photosynthesis or be used to install new metabolic pathways in bacteria.

[...] They modernized the factory by updating the carboxysome, a particularly complex [bacterial microcompartment (BMC)] that requires a series of protein-protein interactions involving at least six gene products to form a metabolic core that takes CO₂ out of the atmosphere and converts it into sugar. To streamline this process, the team created a hybrid protein in cyanobacteria, organisms that have many potential uses for making green chemicals or biofuels.

The new protein replaces four gene products, yet still supports photosynthesis. Reducing the number of genes needed to build carboxysomes should facilitate the transfer of carboxysomes into plants.

Streamlined Construction of the Cyanobacterial CO₂-Fixing Organelle via Protein Domain Fusions for Use in Plant Synthetic Biology [abstract]

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